


Strictly for the birds

by villaindry



Category: Six of Crows Series - Leigh Bardugo
Genre: F/M, Facial Shaving, Touch Aversion
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-25
Updated: 2020-09-25
Packaged: 2021-03-07 20:55:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,530
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26654044
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/villaindry/pseuds/villaindry
Summary: His step on the stair woke her. She had dreamt of it enough times.Inej Ghafa returns to Ketterdam.
Relationships: Kaz Brekker/Inej Ghafa
Comments: 6
Kudos: 58





	Strictly for the birds

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this three years ago and never did anything with it. 
> 
> Title from Idiot Prayer by Nick Cave: 'Love, dear, is strictly for the birds.' Strictly for the birds means something silly, useless, impractical. Of course these poor children would tell themselves that.

The moon rolled into Fifth Harbour long before the Wraith. The little warship stole into Ketterdam’s great inlet quietly, sails lowered, looking slightly less tidy, slightly less sleek, than she had when she set out five months before on her maiden voyage. A maiden no longer, the cannons had tasted gunpowder and the decks knew the sound of steel on steel, of men pleading for mercy and receiving justice. Now those sounds could scarcely be imagined under the peaceful eye of the moon and the gentle rocking of the midnight tide; the Wraith was quiet, sated, she slipped easily between the still ships and her crew was silent in their ministrations as she settled into berth. Inej Ghafa, Captain, having made her final orders and paid her crew, was the last to leave the deck and come ashore.

She hurried towards the rows of gabled roofs where the Lid abutted the water with its quays and docks and ships, the squat sheds of the warehouse district spreading out in the distance, and turned down one of the canals between the Barrel and East Stave. She moved cautiously through the shadows on the ground and shinned up to the rooftops as soon as possible. Her cloak flapped at her heels as she picked up speed, reassured, her feet finding their old pathways again, she danced across the moon-silvered tiles like a stone skimming over water. When she reached the Slat, Inej kept her pace and ran out into the air, one hand lightly catching the eaves as she fell and swinging her out into a graceful arc. She dropped softly onto the cill outside the attic window. There was no light from within, and the window was locked, but she made short work of the latch. Inside, moonlight striped the room black and silver and somehow finer than its reality, a fitting chamber for the bastard prince of the Barrel. Kaz’s used clothes, discarded hurriedly some time before, were scattered across the bed, his files and papers tumbled across the floor from the narrow desk in front of the window that Inej now stepped over as she entered.

One thing was missing: Kaz Brekker himself. She felt vaguely ill at ease, alone in his room after such an absence. But what else could she, the original Wraith herself, have expected? Returning without warning to the city, a revenant spirit with her singular purpose - she could not expect the living city, with its people and their everyday needs and fears and hungers requiring endless tending, to recognise her and respond according to her whim. So, she did not find him here waiting; she was in his room alone. She had been so before. His things were the same, the washstand still stood in the corner, the jug was full. She washed her hands, and, after a moment’s thought, unclasped her long wool cloak and threw off her hat, splashing the icy water over her face, her neck, her brown forearms. She returned to the desk and curled in the great leather chair beside it. Kaz was out, so she would wait for him.

His step on the stair woke her. She had dreamt of it enough times. Her watch said nearly four bells. Not quite dawn. Not quite early enough for the earliest risers in the Barrel, but late enough and light enough for Dirtyhands’ work to finally, briefly, cease. His tread was heavier than usual, the irregularity in his gait painfully pronounced. She sat up straighter when he came into the room at last. 

“Saints, Kaz,” she murmured, taking him in. He was leaning heavily on his cane, arrested in the doorway with barely controlled surprise, and his breath came heavily too, from the stairs. His skin was the colour of dishwater, and a burr of stubble clung to his jaw.

“Ghafa. When did you get back?”

“A few hours ago. What’s the job, Kaz?” She gestured to the stubble, so unlike him. “You look exhausted.”

“Nothing I can’t handle. It took a little more time than I thought - it’s done now.” He lowered himself heavily onto the edge of the bed, not quite able to subdue the minute huff of air through his nose that signified how much it hurt him.

Inej watched him as he stretched out his bad leg, hooking both hands underneath it and swivelling it slowly, haltingly, onto the bed beside him. He didn’t look at her while he massaged along its length, letting out an occasional grunt, and Inej understood why. She had surprised him, he hadn’t had time to throw up his usual defences. What’s more, she had found him in pain and clearly exhausted. She wanted to say, it’s me. You can hurt with me. You can be tired and exhausted and show it. You can bend - she eyed his back, ramrod straight, and his neck where it rose white and straining from his shirt, the tendons all standing out - you can bend with me, it’s not the same as breaking.

Instead she stood up. “I’ll go. I’m intruding on your rest.”

“I don’t have time for that,” he grunted - he still wouldn’t look up. “I only came back to change my shirt. I have business to attend to, at six bells.” 

Inej only regarded him silently from where she stood by the door. Her gaze prickled him. “Pass me that shirt,” he gestured across the room. He was irritated. She had been away, she couldn’t judge him. Business went on in the Barrel, he wanted to shout. Without it empires fell and kingdoms were ruined, and so the deals would never cease. There was no pretty ship to carry him away from Ketterdam. She threw him the clean shirt.

“You have time to shave, I think,” she said softly, acquiescing. “You should look your best.” This time he did look up. As he feared, she filled his vision instantly. She wore a loose blouse under a trim, dark wool tunic. Its collar fell open and was starkly pale against the deep brown V of her throat. Her usual braid was unfastened and fell like one of her heavy ship’s ropes down her back, oiled to a perfect black sheen. There was a new tilt to her chin and arch to her brows that came, he supposed, from months of commanding her own crew. 

She felt scrutinised, briefly. He’s looking to see if I’ve changed. Well I have - we’ve both changed.

Kaz’s leg, for example, was tremoring more than she’d ever seen when he heaved up from the bed to draw the washstand closer to the desk. He fetched a folded leather case from a drawer and laid it open; there was a blade, a cloth, a cake of soap and bottle of perfumed oil nestled within. A mirror was also retrieved, a tarnished silvery thing with a cracked glass that split his face in two like an ugly grimace. The tremor continued. Seated before the mirror, it stuttered up through his leg and the face in the glass quivered also; his hands, in their gloves, were dark unquiet things. 

He didn’t want to be watched, but she stayed anyway. When the blade made its first sweep across his cheeks, brisk at first with a lock picker’s confidence but faltering on the last flourish, a pink tinge crept into the creamy lather and he hissed in a breath. She crossed to him wordlessly and took the razor from his fingers. He gave it compliantly enough, but then turned away.

“You’ve only just got back.”

Yes, she had. But she wasn’t weary. She could do it.

“If you must.”

He could try and be pleased to see her.

He looked at his lap and fidgeted with the fingertips of his gloves, straightening the seams here and there. But he was, he said very quietly. Inej felt his tension uncoil a little and she sat more firmly on the desk in front of him, pulled up the basin on its stand, allowed the moment to pass by checked but not interrogated in the unhurried ruffle and flurry of soap and water, the knife tinkling in the basin and the flannel, lightly dampened, pressed with care to his stinging cheek. 

Left. Right. A little more right. She gave curt instructions and he followed them studiously. They settled into a rhythm. The knife dipped into the water and rose, flashing, to be sheathed for a moment in the flannel in an elegant stroke. These first motions Inej performed in complete absorption. She leaned away from him, rocking onto one leg to reach into the basin, cleaning the knife in rapid, darting motions. Her hands, which Kaz undertook to focus on, went to and fro like the house martins that sometimes made their nests under the eaves of the Slat, diving, resting, then starting up again, and always moving apart and coming together with the precision of creatures utterly sure of themselves and each other. Kaz watched in silent fascination. Then she would lean in to him again, almost painfully close, and he would lose sight of her hands as he pitched into darkness for a moment. But she was deft, able, she didn’t need to touch him. He only moved his head where she willed it and the chill edge of the blade made its fastidious caress.

Only, so close, the scent of her became very strong. There was a brininess that caught the nose, first, from months of sea air. The scent was not unusual to inhabitants of the trading town. But beneath that, as beneath the flustered surface of the sea, were the familiar, cool, deep notes that were so singularly Inej. Her skin (and the woody soap she always washed with), her hair (and the amber oil she used to sleeken it), and then the keener tang of exertion that clung in the folds of her clothes. Even that scent was too familiar, too uniquely of herself, not to quell the threatening revulsion that lived inside him. 

She would do the underside of his chin. Look up, she said. Almost meek now, he allowed his head to fall against the scarred leather of the chair back. The water splashed, the knife scraped and receded, another splash. His eyes drifted closed. 

With his eyes closed and his cheeks mostly smooth and pinked from the razor’s pull, Inej thought some of the years accumulated over his face seemed to have been shaken away. His lashes, where they flickered lightly against the blueish skin around his eyes, were long and slightly damp, they had formed together into a range of tiny black barbs. She leaned in, closer than before, taking advantage of his distraction to better see this miniature piece of artistry. She fancied she was seeing the strokes where some painter's brush had taken too much black, and overladen, dabbed clumsily at the canvas to create a beauty purely accidental and wholly unselfconscious as to its effect— her breath touched his cheek. She froze, thinking of its heat on his skin and expecting his eyes to fly open and his reproach to fly out and pin her like some small creature beneath a crow’s talon. But perhaps he was dozing, anyway, he made no movement or sound. 

Curiously, slowly, she reached out one slim brown finger and settled it, with the minutest pressure, directly beneath his jaw. 

It was a match flare. It was a concentrated point of heat and light and his nerves ignited and thrilled and revolted beneath it. He felt his tongue rise in his mouth and his throat tighten in response, but he forced a dead calm like a funeral shroud onto his face. Because she knew him, of course, Inej saw the muscle working almost imperceptibly in his jaw, felt the fugitive scramble of his pulse, though he remained utterly still. Not sleeping then. She pressed a little more. He lifted his chin higher, a fraction of an inch. Then, the pressure was gone. Then, the brisk swipe of the blade, once, twice, a pause while she checked her work, a small adjustment, and she withdrew.

Kaz kept his eyes closed for a moment after Inej had finished. After the heat, a freshness settled on him like the dampness of morning, and the water cooled and dried on his face. He could sleep, now, he felt the tug of deep currents willing him to let go. 

A subtle movement in the room nudged him back to the surface again. Inej had hopped down from the desk, manoeuvring her way out from between his sprawling legs to cross to the far side of the room. She was busying herself with her things, gathering them up quietly as he watched her. 

“Thought you’d lull me into sleeping, hmm?” He bit into the silence between them, with a vehemence that alarmed even him. 

She didn’t look up from her cloak, which she folded and refolded across her arm. “Could I ever make you do something you didn’t want to do, Kaz? What can I do if you’ve insisted on pushing yourself to exhaustion?” Her voice was measured, shoring up against his spite with her old calm rationality. Guilt knotted itself with bitterness in his throat.

“After Rollins vanished —” He saw Inej shift slightly from one foot to the other, but he rushed on— “After he left the city, the Barrel was in chaos. He left behind a void that all the gangs rushed to fill. The Dregs needed leadership, or they faced extinction. I gave it to them.” He tried to seek out her eyes, willed her to understand, but they were resolutely hooded from him. “I kept this place running—” Without you, he almost said. But he could never resent her for it. The resentment wasn’t real, it was only loss and longing, bound together in the dark.

“It’s all I have,” he finished instead. 

Inej looked up sharply. Her mouth wrenched, she searched his face. When she spoke, though, her voice was still measured. “That has never been true.” They looked at each other quietly for a moment. An old simplicity settled between them, tranquillising as snowfall.

Finally, she turned away, and refastened her cloak about her shoulders. It was dyed the deep grey colour that she had always favoured for her uniform as spider in the Dregs. Under it’s weight she was all shadow again, _his_ shadow, except - he blinked - that was wrong. Something really had changed in her, in the way she stood in the doorway and filled it. Perhaps it was the new dignity of her captaincy, or her certainty in her cause. She had taken on a fresh form and solidity that impressed upon him almost fearfully in the small room, she was no longer a shadow, she herself cast shadows; they hung about her in great folds. She had done what he could not, she had moved on. 

“Where will you stay?” He asked.

“Wylan’s,” she replied. 

“Will you be here long?”

“Three days,” she said, and he nodded. The challenge was thrown down between them, he understood it. 

“Goodnight then, Wraith.”

“Goodnight, Kaz.” She was gone.

**Author's Note:**

> Let me know what you think! 
> 
> It feels like it's set up for a sequel, idk?


End file.
